How to Reprogram Your Mind for Success, Using “Debugging”

Our mind consists of thoughts that
repeat on a daily basis. These thoughts affect our actions and as a
result, affect the outcome or results we experience. If you think the
same thoughts every day, you get the same results as yesterday. To
achieve a different result you need to change your thoughts.

Changing your thoughts is sometimes
called reprogramming your mind.
You ask how to reprogram the mind for success, but I believe this
question is a misnomer. Using the word reprogram means that
you want to change the program or rewrite it from the beginning. I
believe that our mind already contains the programming necessary to
achieve success, we simply need to debug it.

Debugging your mind means getting rid
of the bugs that cause errors in your thinking that sabotage your
efforts at success. These bugs include the thoughts that make you
doubt yourself, procrastinate, afraid to take a calculated risk, and
other habits and beliefs that get in your way.

Instead of writing another program on
top of the one you use right now, you can simply eliminate the errors
in your current program to pave the way to success.

State the Outcome You Desire

In programming, you know you have bugs
in your program when it results in an error. The way to get rid of
those bugs is to clearly identify them and then replace them with the
correct programming.

The difference between computer
programming and mental programming is that in computer science, you
know the outcome you want to achieve. The bug is easier to discover
and repair because you are clear about what the program should do.
Therefore, to eliminate bugs in your mental programming, it’s
necessary to identify the outcome of what you want to achieve.

It’s easier to know what’s wrong for a
specific output than to identify an error for a general outcome.
Instead of asking how to debug the mind for success, choose a
specific outcome, like public speaking. The question then becomes how
to reprogram or debug the mind for public speaking, which is a much
easier problem to solve than debugging for overall success.

Case Study: Debugging Fear of Public
Speaking

I use public speaking as an example
because I recently read about that problem in a self-help forum. The
original poster asked how to not be worried about other people’s
reaction during his speech. Debugging this issue, I discovered the
bug that was making the problem:

The poster wasn’t asking how to deliver
a useful speech, he was asking how to make people like him.

He was using one program (how to make
people like him) to achieve the outcome of another program (how to
give a useful speech). Of course that would cause problems, because
they conflict with each other. It’s not impossible to give a useful
speech and have your audience like you, but making people like you
isn’t the goal of the speech (unless you’re a politician).

The goal of the speech is to send a
message, regardless of whether people like you or not. The bug
here is that focusing on his self-image gets in the way of him
delivering a useful speech. Instead of thinking how to most
effectively communicate his ideas, he is thinking about how to make
people like him.

Interestingly, defending your self-image is a common bug that causes errors in other areas of life, such as communicating with your partner, selling products to your customers, and getting things done. I’ve talked about how protecting your self-image becomes a “meta-goal” or secondary goal that gets in the way of your primary goal and stops you from achieving success.

In the case of public speaking, we
identify that the bug causing the error is focusing on self-image
instead of focusing on effective communication. Once we understand
that, it’s a simple process to change our attention to communicating
effectively and not have the goal to make people like us.

Using Tools to Strengthen Your
Debugging

From the case above, you can see that
building understanding is the correct solution. Identifying the
self-image bug is part of taking inventory of what we know to build
an understanding of the problem. The beauty of understanding is that
once you do it, it’s impossible to not understand. It’s a permanent
solution.

There are tools people mention that help to “reprogram” the mind, such as visualization, meditation, affirmations, and hypnosis. These tools can work to some degree, but they don’t always result in a permanent solution. If you manage to achieve change by using these tools, there’s a possibility that you fall back into your old patterns of habits and beliefs.

That said, those tools can be powerful
combined with correct debugging of a problem. In the case of public
speaking, you can say affirmations to remind yourself about what you
should focus on, such as “I communicate effectively.” You can
also visualize a speaking session where you communicate well and the
audience understands your message.

The power of these tools become
multiplied when you apply them to the correct problem that’s in your
way. You can achieve change and results faster when combining
identification of the bug, and using your favorite technique. Without
knowing the true problem at the root, these techniques will be less
efficient, and make you think they don’t work.

Remember though that the first step is
to state the outcome. It’s difficult to answer how to reprogram your
mind for success if you don’t define what success you want. I hope
the public speaking example can give you a guide to solve your
particular issue. But if not, you can leave a comment below and we’ll
try to debug your problem correctly.

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